Dell discontinues 12-inch netbooks

Dell has stopped selling netbooks with 12-inch screens, in order to concentrate on 10-inch versions.

The company's chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, wrote on Saturday that "it's time for the Mini 12 to ride off into the sunset".

The Mini 12 came out in the UK at the end of last year, providing a larger screen and keyboard size than that found in most netbooks. When the netbook phenomenon took off last year, 10-inch screens became the de facto standard, eclipsing the seven- and nine-inch screens that were used in the original iterations of the cheap subnotebooks.

"For a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooks," Menchaca wrote. "That's why we offer two different 10-inch Inspiron netbooks [in the] Mini 10 and the Mini 10v."

Menchaca also said that portability was a key factor for netbooks buyers, and noted that "larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful" — a comment that he later explained in an update as meaning "customers who buy a 12-inch system expect a little more horsepower".

The Dell Mini 12 was powered, as are most netbooks, by Intel's Atom line of processors. While these low-power chips provide sufficient power for web surfing and light content creation, they are much less powerful than the Core 2 Duo chips that are found in most of Dell's full-size notebooks, which start at a screen size of 13.3 inches.

Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal told ZDNet UK on Monday that 12-inch netbooks may yet succeed in the long term.

"My expectation is that companies are testing the water at the moment and, if 12-inch netbooks take off, then Dell will resume [production of such devices]," Lachal said, adding that Intel and Microsoft may be keen to create a clear size and cost gap between netbooks and notebooks, but manufacturers are "more into providing a range of choices to their customer base".

"I think there is a demand for low-cost notebooks which are of a larger size," Lachal said.

Lachal also suggested that netbook may not always cannibalise sales of more expensive, powerful notebooks because, due to the low cost of netbooks, "a netbook sale does not necessarily replace a laptop sale".